Original subtitles

How do you create a breathtaking resort hotel

from towers that appear to be about to topple,

built on land reclaimed from the sea?

It was how to get these two faces of the buildings

moving in relationship to each other that they were dancing.

How do you balance 4000 tons of museum 40 feet

in the air, built to honor America’s finest?

All together, our jaws just hit the ground of, like, "Wow!"

Can you build something like that?

And how do you design an office building

that tracks the sun to protect an iconic park below?

If we were to build a building

that casted shadows all over the High Line,

that would have been a real sin.

Welcome to a world where anything is possible,

the space where innovation and creativity collide.

This isn’t just impressive. It’s revolutionary.

Where the only limit is human imagination.

This wasn’t just ambitious. It was audacious.

No one had ever attempted anything like it.

Unpacking the miracles

and mysteries of construction.,.

Sometimes buildings can change the world.

And this is one of them.

To ask, How Did They Build That?

In 164 years, just over 3,500 US military personnel have been

awarded the National Medal of Honor for bravery in combat.

So designing a museum

to honor these incredible individuals called

for a building that was not only functional,

but would also embody the huge weight

of responsibility and sacrifice of these true American heroes

through every inch of its construction.

Heroes like Colonel Jack Jacobs, who repeatedly faced enemy fire

to rescue wounded men in Vietnam.

Nobody goes into combat

with the objective of becoming cited for battlefield valor.

Everybody wants to complete the mission,

take care of each other, and go home.

In Afghanistan,

Britt Slabinski led a rescue mission to save a teammate.

Outnumbered and outgunned,

they held out until the team was extracted.

This is really about being human.

We’re seeing a very bad situation

and realizing I can do something

to make the situation better

and willing to give your life to do it.

In Vietnam, Patrick Brady carried out

a daring helicopter mission

to evacuate wounded soldiers.

You’re rescuing great American soldiers.

And if you get killed doing what you’re doing,

what better way to die?

I mean, come on.

By March 2025,

3,528 personnel have been awarded this medal

reserved for the bravest of the brave.

Yet at the start of the 21st century,

there is no place that celebrates these heroes.

But that’s about to change.

We wanted these recipients

to know how much they were appreciated.

To know that there would be a home for their story,

and to know that their sacrifice was not for naught.

In 2019, Arlington, Texas

is chosen as the home of a new museum to honor these heroes:

the National Medal of Honor Museum.

The military is a big deal in Texas.

Almost 100 of the medal’s recipients have lived in Texas,

and 1.8 million veterans

and serving military call it home.

The museum foundation has a building site

and 300 million U.S. dollars.

Now it wants an incredible design.

Just having a normal four-sided building with a roof

that’s a square or rectangle wasn’t going to cut it.

They turned to Rafael Viñoly Architects.

Viñoly’s designs are the perfect antidote to normal.

Viñoly is inspired by the recipients of the medal.

You notice this burden

of responsibility that the recipients feel

after they actually receive the Medal of Honor.

The hunch that he had is that this museum

shouldn’t be a building.

It should be more like a monument.

This translated itself

to a symbolic steel block lifted by five columns,

which are the five branches of the U.S. Army.

Viñoly’s design will give Arlington a building

unlike anything the nation has ever seen.

A beautiful metal box

which appears impossibly balanced in the air.

Somehow, they will need to engineer five slender columns

to represent the then five branches

of the U.S. military,

and be strong enough to carry the entire weight

of the building.

Then they need to create an incredible frame

that can support the 4000-ton museum,

as it appears to float 40 feet in the air.

Finally, they need to create a dramatic way

to transport the visitors up into the monument

and to the inspirational stories inside.

Incredible, but also incredibly challenging.

All together, our jaws just hit the ground of, like,

"Wow, can we actually do that?

Can you build something like that?"

It’s one thing to design it.

It’s another thing for the actual workers and engineers

to put it together up in the air, suspended by cranes,

wind blowing, metal bending, and put the bolts together.

But there was no doubt this was the way we wanted to go.

So in March 2022, the team begins by excavating the site

and constructing a seriously sturdy foundation.

The responsibility of delivering this idea...

all of a sudden became that as "Wow...

Now we have to do it".

The first big challenge

is creating the five enormous columns

that will allow the building to float 40 feet up in the air.

The design load for each of the mega columns was

nearly 2,000 kilopounds,

and that’s a pretty significant load.

It has to be not only a strong column,

it has to be a beautiful column, and to design,

this was the challenge.

Viñoly wants them to be finished in bare concrete,

but pouring them on site?

They can’t guarantee the right finish.

We decided it should be precast concrete

under laboratory conditions, which is more controllable.

And you get qualities of the surface

which is-- which is much, much better.

Even then, the precast concrete sections have

to be finished when they come out of the factory molds.

We had to sandblast them and acid wash

to make the clean finish that the architect wanted

on the exposed columns.

Once complete, the 35 rings are delivered

from their factory in Dallas, Texas, to Arlington,

where they will be carefully lifted into position

to form each column.

It’s a task that falls to tower crane operator Nico Clayton.

Being an operator out here, every piece that I install,

I can honestly say there was no room for error.

Those engineers did a lot of math checking,

and then the pressure was really on us to not break them

when we got them into place.

For veteran Nico,

who served in the Marine Corps,

building the museum is like a military maneuver.

We were all brothers out here, just helping... one big team.

Shifting the 35 pieces

of precast concrete into position is a slow process.

We had to make sure that they were perfectly aligned.

We had some critical lifts. We definitely had some moments.

But in February 2023, all five columns are complete.

Then in March, the team is hit with devastating news.

Rafael Viñoly dies at the age of 78.

It was a big shock for us as a team,

for me personally, to hear when he passed.

I felt this huge responsibility to carry on his vision.

To do that, the team has to overcome the next challenge:

balancing 4000 tons of museum on the five slender columns.

A lot of sleepless nights went into this

because, even if we didn’t know how to make it,

we had to take the lead to tell the team that this is possible.

You have five columns that make a pentagon

of narrow little support points,

and somehow they’ve got

to make it hold up a heavy square building

40 feet in the air.

Their ingenious solution is to create a spider web

of super strong, interconnected steel girders.

We build the pentagon, and then from the pentagon

you make the internal star,

and then from each of the five apexes of the pentagon,

you do the star to connect the corners of the square.

As if it’s not hard enough

constructing the web of steel 40 feet in the air,

they also have to compensate

for when the 4000-ton building goes on top.

You have to actually fabricate it slightly higher

so that when the weight actually starts to act,

it actually sinks down into the final geometry

where you want it.

It was complicated.

We had ambient temperatures of 107 degrees,

and those steel members would raise

and lower off their temporary supports

just due to thermal expansion.

It was moving a lot.

It would move two and a half inches

in and out in the course of a day,

and maybe left and right an inch and a third or so.

It was incredible.

The steel erector told us it was the most complicated thing

he had done in a 40-year career.

In May 2023, the intricate web of steel

that forms the frame is finished.

Now, somehow, they need to construct

the actual museum 40 feet in the air.

They’ve constructed a firm frame,

but it’s only perched on five points.

That makes building on it a very delicate balancing act.

At the end of the day, we needed a horizontal

exhibition hall and not a crooked one.

The steel had to be put on

in a planned successive order

or the building would twist or tilt out of alignment.

First, they need to construct a steel box

that forms the framework of the museum,

before carefully adding the panels and insulation

that form the walls and make it watertight.

The floor deck, the walls,

and the metal panels...

You had to weight each part

of the building relatively equally

so that it would come together the way it was intended to.

In August 2023,

with the main structure of the museum well underway,

it’s time to tackle the next big hurdle.

We built a museum 40 feet up in the air.

How do we get people actually in there, was the question.

In Arlington, Texas,

the team behind the construction

of the National Medal of Honor Museum is facing

its next big challenge...

...how to get visitors

up to the steel box floating 40 feet in the air.

Viñoly’s vision was for two intertwined,

spiraling staircases that represent the journey of valor.

Separating them represents the rising up

to meet the extraordinary challenges,

and then coming back down to earth,

carrying the weight of those experiences and memories.

A curved construction

like this is very difficult to fabricate.

You basically need to create the plates and bend it

and warp it in a way which is very unusual.

With such high stakes,

they turned to one of the world leaders

in curved steel fabrication, 5000 miles away in Europe.

The Netherlands have a tradition of ship builders,

and hulls of ships are also curved

with thick plates, and therefore they have a certain advantage

to create these kind of curved structures.

Created in sections,

they can only hope their measurements are spot on

once the pieces are on site.

They had to bring it in, and then miraculously,

it had to fit in place.

You can only know if it works

or not when you try to install it,

and that’s when it’s too late.

So everything had

to be coordinated to a quarter of an inch.

They’ve solved the problem of getting people in.

But what about a showstopper of an exhibit?

Well, that’s another story.

Somehow they need to get

Major General Patrick Brady’s Vietnam War

helicopter in there, too.

I thought, "How in the hell are they going to do that?"

It was an engineering feat itself.

The engineers designed an opening

in the actual steel frame

so we could pull the helicopter through.

They picked her up with a crane, and they turned that thing,

and then they fitted it into the building.

With the helicopter safely installed,

the building can be finished.

It’s always exciting to see what you thought

about in sketches or in your computer is actually

really built at the end of the day.

On National Medal of Honor Day, March 25, 2025,

the museum opens to the public.

I could not be more proud to be a part

of this incredible mission.

It took three years to build from 19,000 tons

of steel and concrete.

But it’s bigger than the sum of its parts.

This building, while beautiful, means more to our community

and our country than the architecture.

It’s about our heroes.

This will be a legacy for us

to cherish forever,

and a pathway of hope

for a brighter America for tomorrow.

The results of the Medal of Honor Museum is remarkable.

We all take pride.

There is so much personal suffering involved

that you feel the pressure

to make this one perfect building for them.

When I first walked into this room here,

I had an emotional moment that "We got it".

Packed with the most inspiring stories

of incredible courage, it’s a fitting architectural marvel

to celebrate America’s bravest.

It’s a project that means a lot to everyone.

This museum will allow guys like me

to serve long after we’re dead.

It is so much more than just the building.

It is an effort to pass on the values

that made this country free.

What could you do with 6,000,000 square feet

of waterlogged land?

World famous architect Moshe Safdie

bet he could build an iconic luxury resort

and casino stacked like a house of cards.

It was a huge gamble,

but the developer took the bet and hit the jackpot.

In the early 2000s,

the island city state of Singapore had a population

of four million people

and around 11.5 million visitors each year.

So when the government finally opened the door to casinos...

...American casino magnate Sheldon Adelson

saw an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.

Mr. Adelson really changed the, you know, the dynamic.

In 1999, when the Venetian Las Vegas opened

with 3000 all-room suites and half a million square feet

of retail space--

certainly every development post-The Venetian Las Vegas,

by and large, copied that business model.

In 2005,

the Singaporean government puts out a call for bids

to construct a 6,000,000 square foot mega resort

on a waterlogged plot of land

on the coast at Marina Bay.

Determined to win, Adelson teams up with one

of the world’s most visionary architects, Moshe Safdie.

The Adelsons had known Moshe from, you know,

his work in Israel and other places.

And, um, you know, he was very well respected in Singapore.

Adelson asked Safdie to design the resort around

a single enormous statement hotel tower,

but Safdie isn’t convinced.

3,000 rooms singular building would have been just a wall

that separates the site and downtown from the sea.

We said we must break down the hotel into three towers,

and by slipping them,

that actually almost created a sense of dance.

Safdie’s idea for Singapore’s

first casino is breathtaking.

Sandwiched between the city and the bay will be

three 627-foot-tall towers soaring into the sky.

Building it will be challenging, starting with the land itself,

which, like 20% of Singapore, has been reclaimed from the sea.

Onto soggy, shifting soil,

they will need to figure out how to build

three pairs of leaning towers designed to create big windows

to the views in between.

Finally, they have to crown the 57 floors with a sky garden

the length of four jumbo jets,

which will hang unsupported over thin air and will hold up

one of the world’s largest infinity pools.

It’s a very ambitious design,

but whether it can be built is another story.

To make things more difficult,

the government wants the casino opened in 27 months.

It would be a tight schedule even for a simple tower,

let alone these.

In 2007, construction begins and the team

immediately hits their first challenge:

building on land that used to be ocean.

Marine clay is every engineer’s nightmare: soft, unstable,

like quicksand, dig a hole and it instantly collapses.

So we introduce...

a quite innovative solution using a circular basement wall

to resist the water and the soil.

They’re a bit like giant cookie cutters

that they plunge through the soft ground,

and the circular shape

disperse the pressure from the groundwater.

With the wall in place,

the team starts removing the soft soil from inside,

ready to create the solid foundations.

But in 2008, a year into the project,

the world is plunged into the most severe economic crisis

in 80 years.

At the time,

we were developing in four different jurisdictions.

It put the company in a very tough position

and it had to make some difficult decisions.

It’s 2008, and the construction

of Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands Hotel has been thrown into doubt

by the worldwide financial crisis.

Across the globe,

construction projects are put on hold.

Many never restart, but businessman Sheldon Adelson

is determined that won’t happen here.

Mr. Adelson wrote a very sizable check

to keep the company afloat during the financial crisis.

It means they can keep going.

But with many contractors having gone bust,

the crash meant that opening in 2009 looked unlikely.

The team’s next challenge will be constructing

the leaning towers that will reveal the views around them.

Safdie designed each tower as two halves,

an east side and a west side that leaned inward,

relying completely on each other.

They’re locked together.

If one side moves or slips, the whole thing collapses.

The two halves connect at the 23rd floor.

Until they reach this point, the whole structure is at risk.

This is the magic trick.

How do you keep up a house of cards with only one card, right?

Part of the answer is they build these big temporary struts

that hold the weight of the leaning tower

while they’re constructing it.

The team also wants to super strengthen the concrete

by putting tension on it after it’s poured.

They run steel cables from the top of each tower,

threading through the entire structure and anchoring it

securely into the concrete foundation at the base.

These high tension cables,

they counteract the tower’s extreme lean.

In July 2009, the leaning towers are supported

and post-tensioned, and the team can move on to the next stage.

Until that time, we are stepping on very thin ice.

The three towers soon rocket up towards the sky.

But they won’t be the end of the engineering challenges,

because Safdie’s vision for what goes

on top of them will be even more daring.

The program talked about gardens, swimming pools,

park-like spaces,

and by the time we’ve laid out all the spaces needed

and the tower and so on, the only option possibly

would have been creating many garden spaces,

outdoor spaces within the buildings at different levels.

Instead, Safdie has an audacious idea.

Since we’re working with models in the model shop

and we have the three towers,

there was this big large piece of balsa wood,

and at some point, I don’t know,

it just was a moment of intuition.

I said, "Well, why don’t we take and do that?"

And I put that on top of the... and, you know,

all of a sudden it was total transformation.

Everybody was in shock, including myself.

We sprinkled some lichen on to represent trees

and put a piece of blue paper on it

to represent the pool, and we said, "That’s it."

That’s it was an easy thing to say.

Able to hold nearly 4,000 guests at a time,

Safdie’s Sky Park will be 1,120 feet long

and 125 feet wide.

But that’s only the beginning.

There was another moment where that park was sitting

symmetrically on the three towers.

And then we met with the feng shui consultant,

and he said, "Symmetry is not good."

And I think about it, says, "If symmetry is not good,

let’s go all the way."

And I pushed it cantilever to one side

and everything got transformed again

because it became very dynamic.

Instead of static, it became dynamic.

And when he says dynamic,

he actually means 218 feet of garden

will be sticking out 627 feet up in the air.

To keep it up there,

the enormous overhang will need to be supported just at one end.

Engineers call this a cantilever.

They’re not uncommon,

but this one is truly extraordinary.

If the cantilever structure is too flimsy like a diving board,

it won’t perform as is needed.

To make sure it does,

the engineers devise an extraordinary frame,

incorporating over 7,700 tons of steel,

which is forged into trusses,

beams and incredibly strong box girders.

Along with the rest of the sky garden,

it needs to be lifted 650 feet into the air.

By the time they start, it’s October,

which brings with it rains and high winds.

The box girders in particular were lifted

side by side,

and they were within only a couple meters of the facade.

So what they needed to do was make sure

that that deadlift was very vertical

and would not sway and maybe even hit the tower.

In Singapore,

the construction team behind the Marina Bay Sands Hotel

must lift the Sky Park,

including the 7700-ton overhang 650 feet into the air,

making sure it doesn’t hit the tower on the way up.

When you’re lifting big pieces, as we did--

I mean, unprecedented, big pieces of the sky park--

you better be careful about the wind.

And they monitor the wind carefully.

Especially now, when the monsoon surge brings in

heavy winds and rain.

Thankfully, though, it all goes to plan,

and with the worst out of the way,

they can get the job done.

In early 2010, the sky park is finished.

When the final steel structure was all in place,

that was a wonderful thing to see.

You could finally see the silhouette of the tower

on the skyline.

And on June 23rd,

the Marina Bay Sands Hotel opens its doors.

Having weathered a financial crisis and monsoon season,

it’s a little behind schedule.

But the soaring towers make the wait worthwhile.

I still feel a sense of pride in terms of what we have,

you know, and I think for Singapore, we are truly

blessed to have such an iconic landmark here.

While hanging over 650 feet in the air

atop the three towers is the incredible Sky Park.

Here was an opportunity for me as an architect

to really show what public realm can be like.

And it’s kind of become both

a regional and a national symbol.

I feel very lucky to have had the good fortune to design it.

The resort now welcomes 45 million visitors a year

and has become an iconic fixture on the city’s skyline.

It’s still the landmark of Singapore,

and it will be for a long time.

New York City did something

downright impressive by its own lofty standards

when it transformed a dilapidated,

elevated railroad track

into one of the city’s most beloved public parks:

the High Line.

But as the park flourished, new construction

all around threw a little too much shade,

threatening its survival-- that is, until the Solar Carve

let the light shine on how to be

a good neighbor to the High Line.

Solar Carve is not your everyday building.

It’s sculpted by sunlight itself.

Think of it as a skyscraper designed by the sun,

a tower that protects the city below.

160,000 square feet of office space.

butting up against the High Line,

a stunning mile and a half long elevated park running

through Manhattan, Solar Carve could have been

a disaster.

The High Line spurred a massive

amount of development all around it.

From the Hudson Yards down to the Meatpacking District,

you had developers buying every square inch.

The new buildings going up were getting

taller and taller.

They threatened to plunge

the High Line into permanent shadow,

killing the park’s precious plant life.

But the developers of the site,

on the corner of 10th Avenue

and 14th Street, are determined to do something different.

Sunlight is obviously of the utmost importance.

If we were to build a building here that would cast shadows

on the vegetation of the High Line, it would have been

detrimental to their vibrancy and their vitality.

So the challenge is on.

How do you build an incredible new tower

without blocking out all of the light?

By looking to the past.

For millennia, we’ve created increasingly

complicated structures based around the movement of the sun,

ancient stones that mark the changing of the seasons.

The Egyptian pyramids were built to catch the solstice light.

Then the Mayans aligned buildings

with astrological events.

But building a modern working skyscraper

sculpted by the path of the sun?

That would be a whole different story.

So right back in the concept stage,

we were working with the architect to look at

all the different sun angles

throughout the whole year, and adding up how much

light hits different parts of the High Line.

Predicting exactly how shadows

would fall was insanely complicated.

It took cutting-edge software to get it just right.

A lighting team actually did all these models

with all the sun paths passing over it throughout the year.

And you can actually figure out how much light we’re actually

letting through onto different areas of the High Line.

Now the architects of Studio Gang need

to transform this concept into a design

for the new tower.

We have dozens of models where

we tried different geometries and tested those,

and ultimately

landed on this kind of angular geometry.

One engineer described it

as taking a bite out of an apple,

but this bite meant the High Line got three times more

sunlight than a typical building would allow.

A big bite in the Big Apple is a bold idea

and has an even bolder design.

They’ll need to start

at the bottom by driving in super deep concrete piles,

without damaging the High Lines’ wooden piles

that are a hundred years old.

The tower will then have pieces of building

carved out to allow the sun to reach the High Line.

But while they’ve calculated where to carve,

they now have to work out how to do it without

weakening the entire building.

Finally, they’ll need to cover it

in glass in a way that’s safe for birds and keeps people

below from getting fried like ants

under a magnifying glass.

Oh, and the developers need

to buy in to what’s a pretty out there design.

Studio Gang’s design stood out when it came to creating

something really special in this neighborhood.

The complication, though, was the cost

and complexity of building this building.

They decide helping the High Line underneath

makes it worthwhile, but it’s not going to be easy.

If we were building this building

in an open field in the middle of nowhere,

would we be able to hammer piles into the ground?

Yes, because the vibrations

associated with that activity would impact nothing.

However, given the proximity of the High Line,

you have some pretty serious issues.

Because although the High Line was opened to the public

as a beautiful park in 2009, it didn’t start out that way.

In the early 1900s,

New York City streets were a death trap.

New York’s booming growth

flooded the streets with people, cars,

trucks, you name it,

all fighting for space beneath towering new buildings.

People were walking across the street and just getting hit

by trains, you know, that were carrying pretty hefty materials

right through pedestrian traffic.

10th and 11th avenues were

so dangerous, they were known as Death Avenue.

In 1929, the city

and the railroad company came together

and knew that they needed to do something differently.

I bring you today the final elimination,

of what has for years been known as the Death Avenue site.

The solution was to elevate the tracks,

move them from the street,

and build an elevated freight train structure.

Freight transportation booms

and the streets below are finally safe again.

Fast forward 50 years,

and there’s no more need for freight trains in the city.

In 1980, the High Line carries its last cargo.

Then in 1999, just before leaving office,

Mayor Rudy Giuliani orders its demolition,

but locals have seen it become something special.

What took root was this beautiful landscape

made up of wildflowers and different grasses.

Friends of the High Line, a nonprofit organization

determined to save the High Line, raises 50 million USD,

and the city commits another 100 million.

They bring in design studio Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro,

landscape architects, field operations,

and garden designer Piet Oudolf to create the stunning park.

It was breathtaking.

An urban oasis pulling in millions

of visitors every single year.

But it’s still a century-old structure constructed using

lots of wood, which frankly, doesn’t age very well.

Building next to it could cause it to collapse.

They needed a smarter solution.

In the Meatpacking District of New York City,

work is underway to construct the foundation of a new tower

right next to the High Line public park.

They couldn’t drive piles the usual way,

because vibrations might damage the High Line’s

fragile timber foundations.

They needed a smarter solution.

It kind of looks like a massive corkscrew...

that is constantly moving soil from the bottom up over the top.

Used on soft soils where the land has been reclaimed,

these drills create the minimum amount of ground disturbance.

You drill the ground out and you actually extract the cuttings,

as we call it, from inside the pile, to create a hole

all the way down to the rock that you

then fill with reinforcement and pouring concrete.

With painstaking care, Solar Carve’s foundation

goes in without bringing the High Line down.

The next challenge is building the carves.

Cutting chunks out of a building is extremely risky,

like pulling a leg out from under a table.

How do you stop it from tipping over?

On a normal building,

floors are supported by columns

which transfer the loads directly into the foundation.

But the carve would leave them hanging in mid-air.

The solution was to slope the columns,

which came with its own challenges.

Wherever they change direction,

they create a horizontal force,

and that tries to pull the column out of the slab.

To keep everything rock solid,

engineers had to tie everything back to the one part

of the building strong enough to resist it: the core.

This structural spine usually sits in the middle.

But having cut out the carves, the developer wants

to keep as much premium floor space as possible.

So they put it on the far side,

but that’s much further away from the sloping columns.

So where these horizontal forces

need to go into the core,

there’s more reinforcing steel,

which is what holds that force back, particularly

if it’s sloping away at the edge of the building.

We have to pull that force back.

We have to pull all this extra steel in there.

In fact, it takes tons of concrete and steel.

But in April 2018, the structure of the Solar Carve is solid,

and the team turns its attention

to creating the curving glass facade.

So with a big glass facade,

particularly with these curved sections to it,

there was a concern about the effect of focusing the light.

In 2013, the curved glass on the brand new

Walkie Talkie building in London had melted

the cars parked below.

It is the hottest I have ever felt in London.

It’s all because of that building beside me.

It’s just fried an egg. That’s how hot it is.

It falls to Marcus and the team

to make sure that doesn’t happen to the High Line.

The carve created very complicated geometry.

How do I sculpt the surface

into individual pieces that can be prefabricated?

So this gemstone-like pattern came together where the diamond

and the triangles create the sculpted surface.

There’s lots of facets,

and that actually tends to disperse the light

and reflect it in different places.

So there’s not one big sort of focusing effect.

We all felt we had come up with

something that was quite extraordinary.

The other major challenge the facade

needs to overcome is flying birds.

There are a billion birds killed every year flying into glass

because they just don’t see the building.

If there’s too much reflectivity,

then they perceive it as a reflection of the sky.

In some instances, they may not perceive the surface at all.

The team is determined to ensure the Solar Carve

- isn’t an avian death trap. - You can do a number of things.

Our glass is very dark,

and the angled surface and the framing

provides a visual noise that the birds see

and it protects them.

It takes 36 months to design

and fit the glass exterior,

But finally, in July 2019,

Solar Carve takes its place

as the High Line’s good neighbor,

a shining example of how modern architecture can work

to improve the lives of the people

and the nature around it.

I think the first time that I stepped onto the 10th floor,

which is the top floor

of this building, looking to my left,

you could see straight through the glass.

That was the first time where I said to myself,

"Wow, we did something spectacular here."

The architects who built this building actually

kept in mind the people who live here.

It’s nice to have some life in New York.

This ingenious design not only protects the High Line,

but also inspires others to preserve

this stunning parkland and its surrounding environment

for generations to come.

I can see if it had gone all the way out to the pavement,

this space would have been one big shadow.

Studio Gang’s good neighbor,

the daring Solar Carve has earned its place

besides the extraordinary reimagination of the High Line.

Creating something here that was special was vitally important,

But also vitally important to us is the neighborhood as a whole.

And if we were to build a building here

that casted shadows all over the High Line,

that would have been a real sin.

♪ MTV ♪